paulrudy

Why is a data center suing for access to 750K gallons/day of Colorado river water?

https://www.kpbs.org/news/environment/2026/06/15/imperial-va...

I've been keeping my eye on AliasVault[1]. Open-source, self-hostable or pay for cloud hosting, handles both email aliases and passwords.

I'll probably switch for password management once it has a proper security audit, and for email aliases once (if) they implement IMAP/SMTP or similar so reading emails isn't restricted to in-app.

[1]: https://www.aliasvault.net/

Same story here. I'll never go back to Apple Music, even if only for streaming. I had hundreds of tracks and albums just demolished by something related to iTunes Match, didn't realize for months, and didn't have a solid backup system at the time.

I've been on mailbox for 6 years and I think the only issue I've had with rejections has been the email confirmation from some Discourse-based forums. But after I contacted the hosts and was added manually, the forums' emails made it through with no issue

Thank you, this really clarified things for me!

Thank you. So based on your examples it sounds like the "computation" term is quite literal. How would this apply at larger levels of complexity like interacting anonymously with a database or something like that?

> FHE enables computation on encrypted data

This is fascinating. Could someone ELI5 how computation can work using encrypted data?

And does "computation" apply to ordinary internet transactions like when using a REST API, for example?

In Robert Waggoner's book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, the author, who was a very skilled lucid dreamer from childhood, describes how he had a moment of insight after waking from a lucid dream. He had been thinking of himself as the controller of his dreams, and treated them mostly as entertainment. But he realized that for everything he "decided" in his lucid dream, there was far more content that arrived, unplanned--scenery, characters, events, and so on.

This made him curious about using awareness within the dream not just for entertainment, but to conduct experiments and tests, to research what was and wasn't possible, what dream characters and dream consciousness knew or didn't know, all from within the dreams themselves. He's spent decades doing that, and comparing notes with other skilled lucid dreamers.

It's an incredibly fascinating book, a sort of natural history of the dream world by a seasoned traveler within it.

Also has a bunch of useful tips on cultivating lucid dreaming, which I remember working pretty well a few times when I had been disciplined enough to practice them.

"From TFA: ‘Highlights automatically surfaces directions for a location’ Is that a mistype? In an apple advertisement?"

"Highlights" as a singular brand/product/whatever name. Like saying "Postmates delivers stuff"

Since I only partly understand your comment, I'm not sure if this pertains, but the phrase "spatiotemporal encoding" caught my attention. It makes intuitive sense that complex cognitive function would be connected to spatiotemporal sensations and ideas in an embodied nervous system evolved for, among other things, managing itself spatially and temporally.

Also, Riccardo Manzotti's book "The Spread Mind" seems connected. Part of the thesis is that the brain doesn't form a "model" version of the world with which to interact, but instead, the world's effects are kept active within the brain, even over extremely variable timespans. Objects of consciousness can't be definitively separated from their "external" causes, and can be considered the ongoing activity of those causes, "within" us.

Conscious experience as "encoding" in that sense would not be an inner representation of an outer reality, but more a kind of spatiotemporal imprint that is identical with and inextricable from the activity of "outer" events that precipitated it. The "mind" is not a separate observer or calculator but is "spread" among all phenomenal objects/events with which it has interacted--even now-dead stars whose light we might have seen.

Not sure if I'm doing the book justice here, but it's a great read, and satisfyingly methodical. The New York Review has an interview series if you want to get a sense of the ideas before committing to the book.

His autobiography, And There Was Light, and a collection of talks, Against the Pollution of the I, are wonderful

Whew. I'm sorry you had that situation to grow up in, caught up from an early age in maneuvering relative to a parent's insecurities and emotional blindness. I can relate in some ways. I hope the clarity with which you wrote about it now is an expression of having come to some healing and peace!

Good point, yeah, generally the basic survival topics are still in play even when we're busy with finer details! Still, giving an intelligent species the credit for (perhaps) engaging in the final details seems like something generous to leave on the table! Like whale dating apps, exactly.

Maybe the trees would show something useful to GTP

All of those options sound interesting and plausible, yet when I go for a walk while talking with a friend, I'm imagining an alien anthropologist wondering, "Are they communicating the ambient air temperature, and the availability of food nearby, their orientation to the sun and Venus setting?" Maybe the whales are gossiping, or sharing old stories, songs, jokes...

This point of view could be applied to any word, and the extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter of what is a legitimate concept or not.

Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.

Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word and shared meaning, and between those and individual experience.

It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.

I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.

"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.

> But calling it an unsupported belief system goes a bit far. It certainly isn't proven scientific theory.

I agree it would be going too far to call it an unsupported belief system. I don't think I implied that it's unsupported, but it is a belief system. My point is that even with support, the underlying, unproven or unprovable assumptions should not be glossed over.

I'm skeptical that we have a mechanistic explanation of intelligence. I think we have sensible-but-unproven hypotheses, partially supported by observations, for how intelligence might evolve/arise. There's a lot of hand-waving between mechanistic principles and an outcome of general intelligence. One can imagine Occam's razor applying, if the hand-waving eventually resolves to something coherent. Until then, it's a combination of good science and fantasy.

Intelligence is just one of many human experiences that are believed/assumed to have mechanistic explanations. We should be careful to recognize the assumptions, however sound they may seem, and not turn them into dogma.

Yes, that's true. Generally, we see that point of view as a belief, an article of faith (and of course the subject of a lot of disagreement) but we're falsely conditioned to imagine that the purely-mechanical view is free of all that, and it's not.

> but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton.

I feel very weird about this too.

This de facto assumption that organisms are mechanisms first, that "higher-order" experiences we are familiar with as humans are at best "emergent" from these mechanisms--I wish people would understand that this is fundamentally as much a belief system, an article of faith, as the many alternatives are.

Saying this doesn't imply that every belief system is equally valuable or scientifically verifiable. But I think it's important to recognize one's axioms and/or biases.

The mechanistic view is certainly compelling and has the appearance of being all-encompassing.

Its all-encompassing appearance may actually be an artifact of how used to the story we've grown. A clockwork universe. We know that one by heart, whether we're scientists or not. We can apply that template to anything, and set about exploring (or reading about) the mechanisms. The fact that there are mechanisms everywhere doesn't prove that mechanism is all there is. That last part is an implicit belief system, a hidden article of faith, and that's how you get Descartes vivisecting dogs, and conscious experience necessarily (as though no other possibility could exist) having to be an "emergent" property.

As far as I am aware, these kinds of nonlinear relationships are a feature of fractal dynamics, but I'm not a mathematician.

When I think of isometric exercise, I think of co-contracting opposing muscle groups so that the body is exerting more effort than would be minimally necessary to maintain a posture. That kind of exertion would be antithetical to the practice of taichi, but perhaps that wasn't what you meant.

If you meant simply that a posture or position is held against the resistance of gravity or some other resistance (like a partner), then that's isometric contraction by definition, since there is muscle activity but the joints are not moving.

Still, by that definition, describing taichi as a form of isometric exercise doesn't really cut it for me. A fundamental part of practice is to continue discovering how to muscularly engage less, in order to free up the sensitivity, availability, and responsiveness of the body. The phrase "isometric exercise" doesn't conjure up that important aspect in my mind, but that's entirely subjective.

Another aspect is that in practice, there is constant motion in the joints in taichi. Holding static postures is a common and useful aspect of training, but the actual use of taichi (a martial art, after all) is entirely dynamic. To an outside observer, a movement might appear as though a practitioner is holding their arm, spine, and head in fixed positions while turning the waist or stepping, but in actuality, every joint should be adapting and moving in concert with its neighbors. Nothing is held in a fixed position--one reason being that as soon as you're committed to holding something in a fixed position, your partner/opponent will exploit that as a fulcrum to destabilize you.

Isometric exercise involves co-contraction of muscle groups. Taichi involves the minimal contraction of muscle to produce posture and movement, and encourages maximum availability for responsive, springy movement in every joint. If you're practicing taichi, you're not exerting force against yourself. Isometric contraction is antithetical to taichi practice.

I'm only a fractal enthusiast, but my impression is that the key distinction that makes these fractals, or at least fractal-like, is not their detail per se, but that there is complexity at every scale. From the article:

> we find intricate structure at every scale

> At every length scale, small changes in the hyperparameters can lead to large changes in training dynamics

Love this take, and I agree. Where do you think this monorail proclivity comes from (assuming it wasn't "predetermined")? My hand-wavy first guess is an interwoven legacy of patriarchy, trauma, and power structures including theological ones that reflected and reinforced it.

Or maybe it's just that we tend to grab shiny things, just like crows and monkeys, and a sense of singular certainty just seems particularly shiny.

[Wyslawa Szymborska's "Coversation With a Stone"](https://web.archive.org/web/20201127013535/https://www.tweet...)

And also

> Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones: But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

-- Richard Wilbur, from ["Epistemology"](https://web.archive.org/web/20211109141828/https://www.poetr...)

> consciousness is an emergent phenomenon That's a theory that has yet to be tested, not a certainty.

<digression>

> Every atom in your brain behaves according to the laws of particle physics...

These are assumptions. They're very plausible and useful ones. They may turn out to be absolutely correct, but it's still worth noting that they are theories.

"Every atom behaves..." so far, so good, yes it does.

"...according to the laws of particle physics"-- presumably yes, with this caveat: The existence of a complete set of inviolable "laws" that explain _all_ physical behavior is an article of faith. It's a plausible potential outcome of the extremely practical process of collective scientific inquiry that so far seems to hold up, but still-- the concept of a set of laws as programs and constraints for absolutely all physical phenomena is fundamentally a philosophy. It has proven to be extremely useful, but it's not a proven or even probable fact. It's a powerful axiom.

</digression>

> ...and somehow consciousness emerges out of that.

Back to the assumption that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from the physical activity of a brain:

Is a (functional) brain both necessary and sufficient for consciousness to "emerge"? I don't know, I'm just a person interested in this stuff, but I think it's an important question without a definite answer.

We tend to assume that having a brain is a necessary requirement for consciousness, but testing for consciousness (not to be confused with mere rationality) is difficult, as far as I know. I can't prove that a stone, plant, or region of spacetime has no consciousness.

Even if we came up with a test for "consciousness", and that this test _did_ prove that a brain (or a similarly complex network) is necessary for consciousness to appear, there is still the issue of whether the brain is sufficient. How would we know?

Whatever it is that we call consciousness may emerge from the complex physical phenomena of brain activity, as you said. Or the brain may be a catalyst for the phenomena we label consciousness. Or a brain (or human body) may only be a prerequisite for us, with our current capacities, to be able to observe the experience we have come to label "consciousness".

"Light" used to mean only the visible spectrum, until we understood there was more to it: Light went beyond the limits of what we had up til then used to recognize its existence, and indeed it occurred even in what we had called "darkness", and blue things didn't contain blueness in and of themselves, nor were blue things producing blue light.

I'm not advocating for any particular alternate theory, or proposing that consciousness operates outside of known physical constraints, I'm just a stickler for reminding ourselves what concepts are articles of faith, even in science itself

Now how do we get something like this to work (safely) inside our bodies to remove the microplastics embedded in our tissues?

Studies like this one https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-spinal-fluid-... suggest that visual (at least, and perhaps other) stimulation increases blood flow in the brain, and the lack thereof can increase the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, which flushes out toxic substances. This study was done with waking subjects, but the article points out that the process is much more pronounced in sleep.

Perhaps this process occurs in naps as well, helping to refresh the brain on a biochemical level.